WebProNews

Tag: berlin film festival

  • Meryl Streeps Faces Backlash After Commenting ‘We’re All Africans Really’

    Meryl Streeps Faces Backlash After Commenting ‘We’re All Africans Really’

    Meryl Streep dismissed questions about the all-white panel at the Berlin Film Festival Thursday by commenting that “we’re all Africans really,” which has ignited a furor on the internet.

    According to CBS News, Streep, who heads up a seven-member jury, said she was committed to equality and inclusion “of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions.”

    “This jury is evidence that at least women are included and in fact dominate this jury, and that’s an unusual situation in bodies of people who make decisions,” Streep said. “So I think the Berlinale is ahead of the game.”

    In response to a question asking whether she understood films from the Arab world and North Africa, Streep said that while she didn’t know much about the region, “I’ve played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures.”

    “There is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all we’re all from Africa originally,” she said. “Berliners, we’re all Africans really.”

    Social media posts were strewn with expressions of disbelief and anger over Streeps’ comments.

    The festival opens Thursday with the jury’s other members, German actor Lars Eidinger, British film critic Nick James, French photographer Brigitte Lacombe, British actor Clive Owen, Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher and Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska, deciding who goes home with the coveted Golden Bear.

    The Coen brothers’ comedy “Hail, Caesar!” starring George Clooney, Josh Brolin and a slew of other A-list celebrities kicked off the festival on Thursday.

  • Netflix Acquires Jamie Dornan-Starring ‘Jadotville’

    Netflix Acquires Jamie Dornan-Starring ‘Jadotville’

    Netflix has picked up Jadotville, a war drama starring Fifty Shades of Grey’s Jamie Dornan for a 2016 debut. The movie will go into production in April, with shooting locations in Ireland and South Africa.

    Netflix acquired the film at the Berlin Film Festival. Here’s the description:

    A gripping true story of incredible bravery against impossible odds, the film thrillingly depicts the 1961 siege of a 150-strong Irish UN battalion under Commander Patrick Quinlan (Dornan) by 3,000 Congolese troops led by French and Belgian mercenaries working for mining companies. Canet plays a French commander who sought to defeat Quinlan and his men.

    The film is directed by Richie Smyth and written by Kevin Brodbin (Constantine). Alan Moloney will produce for Parallel Films.

    “The story of how Pat Quinlan led his troops against an overwhelming force without losing a single man is one of the great stories of the 20th century, and we are proud to be working with such a talented and committed team to bring it to life,” said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos. “This film will be an amazing addition to our global original films initiative.”

    “As filmmakers, we are constantly looking for new ways to bring a movie to the largest possible audience. Netflix has already reinvented the TV market and is now moving front and center into the film business. We are proud and excited to be part of their story and innovation,” said Parallel Films’ Alan Moloney.

    Also at the Berlin Film Festival, Netflix screened Better Call Saul, Bloodline, What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Chef’s Table.

    Netflix also just released a new trailer for forthcoming documentary My Own Man from executive producer Edward Norton.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Juliette Binoche Opens Film Fest With Arctic Film

    Juliette Binoche opened the Berlin Film Festival, known to the locals as Berlinale, with her new film, Nobody Wants The Night.

    The film stars Juliette Binoche and is directed by Spain’s Isabel Coixet, who is only the second woman director to ever open the festival.

    Juliette Binoche‘s film didn’t receive as many accolades as one would hope, but the premise is incredibly interesting.

    Described as Jack London with women by Coixet and a woman’s western by Juliette Binoche, the film follows Josephine Peary (Binoche), the determined and well-educated wife of Robert Peary, who is an American adventurer who wanted to lead the first expedition to the North Pole.

    The year is 1908 and the setting is Greenland’s forbidding frozen outer reaches.

    Juliette Binoche’s character braves below freezing temps, avalanches, and wild animals to find her husband. When she finally finds his base camp, she is greeted by none other than her husband’s Inuit mistress, Alaka (played by Japan’s Rinko Kikuchi), who is pregnant.

    The two women, though natural enemies, have no choice but to hunker down together and wait for Robert’s return.

    As the food runs low and Alaka’s pregnancy progresses, Binoche’s character assumes a caretaker role. She hunts for their food and enables them to survive.

    Juliette Binoche said of the film’s premise, “You have a white, educated person… she goes into the wilderness and finds a new way of feeling, a new way of behaving and this kind of nowhere place becomes the place where she kind of humanizes.”

    She added, “We come in the world, in this western world , as thinking we know everything, having power, we possess everything, and the elements and the others are telling us, ‘hang on a minute’.”

    Juliette Binoche said the title came from a line in the film.

    She said, “Nobody wants the night, nobody wants to go to that dark place but we have to sometimes if we want to become human.”

    Sounds interesting! What do you think of the story behind Juliette Binoche’s film?

  • Juliette Binoche Braves Sub-Zero Arctic Temps to Film ‘Nobody Wants the Night’

    Juliette Binoche braved miserable Arctic conditions to star as Josephine Peary in Nobody Wants the Night, which documents the story of one determined woman trying to find her missing husband at the North Pole.

    The absolute misery of living through the freezing conditions is apparent in a behind the scenes video recently released.

    Peary is joined on the life or death adventure by veteran arctic explorer Bram Trevor, played by Gabriel Byrne, who tries to dissuade her from going to the icy lands by showing her his hands damaged beyond recognition from frost bite, along with words of warning about the the dangers of the North.

    Tensions mount between Peary and Inuit Allaka, played by Rinko Kikuchi, when Peary tries to “civilize” the native-Greenlander instead of learning from the woman’s extensive knowledge on how to survive sub-zero temperatures.

    Kikuchi is best-known for her role in Alejandro Inarritu’s 2006 Golden Globe-winning ensemble piece Babel and in Pacific Rim by Guillermo del Toro.

    Byrne, a familiar face to movie-goers, is best-known for his role in The Usual Suspects.

    The 50-year-old French actress was most recently seen in Godzilla , but also received much acclaim and an Academy Award, for her turn in The English Patient . Her other films include The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Chocolat.

    Nobody Wants the Night was chosen to open this year’s 65th annual Berlin International Film Festival, which runs February 5-15.

    “I’m very pleased that Nobody Wants the Night will open the 2015 Berlinale,” said festival director Dieter Kosslick in a statement. “Isabel Coixet has created an impressive and perceptive portrait of two women in extreme circumstances.”

  • Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst in New Thriller

    Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst brought an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired thriller to life at the Berlin Film Festival this past week. The Two Faces of January premiered at the festival Tuesday, and also stars Oscar Isaac. This films marks the directorial debut of Iranian-British screenwriter Hossein Amini, known for writing the 2011 blockbuster Drive.

    The film is based on a novel written by the late Patricia Highsmith. The U.S. crime writer was best known for penning The Talented Mr. Ripley. Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst star as an American couple–Chester and Colette–who are on vacation in Greece. After catching the eye of a Greek tour guide named Rydal–played by Oscar Isaac–the film takes a sudden turn. Soon murder, mystery and a love triangle all take center stage.

    Mortensen says he was a huge fan of Highsmith and loved the ‘film noir aspects of the story.’

    “It’s a term that’s thrown around a lot — it needs to have shadows, it needs to be black and white,” he said. “The only thing I would say is that the characters need to lie and lose, and it needs to end badly for everyone.”

    He also believes in order for there to be intrigue, that all characters should have secrets.

    “That’s what the story’s generally about: the masks, and the masks fall away, and what you end up seeing about these people is often ugly and embarrassing,” he said. “But when it’s well done, when the thriller aspect works in terms of storytelling, no matter how badly they behave you’re on their side somehow. You don’t want the cops to catch them.”

    The Two Faces of January garnered mixed reviews at the Berlin Film Festival last week. The Daily Telegraph called it an “elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class”. But movie website Indiewire summed it up as a “competent disappointment”. It will be very interesting to learn how it does back home in U.S. theaters.

    Image via YouTube

  • Shia LaBeouf Hides From Spotlight With A Brown Paper Bag

    This past weekend, Shia LaBeouf sported a tuxedo accented with a brown paper bag over his head when he walked the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival. The actor’s brown paper bag was customized with two holes to see with and bore the words “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” written in large, black ink.

    These words seem to be LaBeouf’s only message to the world, as he has been tweeting only this phrase nearly every day since mid-January. Contrary to what his tweets say, the actor has actually been in the spotlight a lot recently, since admitting to plagiarism allegations last December.

    LaBeouf plagiarized the work of author Daniel Clowes but did eventually apologize for not crediting Clowes properly. Clowes’ graphic novel Justin M. Damiano, contained the art  that LaBeouf used as inspiration for his film, “HowardCantour.com”.

    LaBeouf has since tweeted his apology and even had the words “I am sorry Daniel Clowes” sky-written above Los Angeles. He also went on to announce that he was “retiring from all public life” in a tweet published on January 10.

    The 27-year-old actor was in Berlin attending the premiere of his latest film, “Nymphomaniac – Volume 1”, directed by Lars von Trier.

    At the press conference to promote the new film, LaBeouf was asked what it was like to be involved in a movie packed with so many sex scenes. The former lead actor of the ‘Transformers’ movies responded slowly with a quote, pausing to take a drink of water in between, “When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown in the sea.” He then stood up and briskly walked away from the panel.

    The quote is credited to Eric Cantona, French soccer star, in Cantona’s statement in 1995 when he was convicted of assault.

    Image via YouTube